Thursday, March 26, 2009

Maybe it's the generally slow pace of my life on the dole right now, but I am really digging this wine called Slow Paseo. They make a great red and white, it's organic and it's $6.99 at Trader Joe's. Why not get two bottles for your afternoon of drinking and hopelessly emailing resumes?

Monday, March 23, 2009

Those of you who read Gawker regularly know far too much about Julia Allison. For those who don't, where do I begin?

She used to appear on TV a lot as an "Editor At Large" for Star Magazine talking about, you know, celebrities, then she was a dating columnist for Time Out New York, now she is some sort of "lifecaster" who runs a blog about herself (natch) and two one other real-life Sex and the City character and they go to parties, dress up in matching outfits and get photographed with people. (Bonus: the blog requires you to navigate with a horizontal scroll bar.)

Okay, so I'm ducking into a doorway in the East Village this morning to light a cigarette and my eyes wander to this:

Is this that Julia Allison?

If so, this would prove she actually is a real person, not an ad agency composite like Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima.

Also, true fame can only (but may not) happen when you make yourself ubiquitous. If this is her place of residence, Kudos to Allison for putting her full name, sorry, brand, in her building's buzzer listing.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Just picked up a bottle of "?" which is a new red from California at Trader Joe's Wine Shop in Manhattan., $5.99. Went great with my smoked turkey, ham and cheese samich at lunch. Very drinkable, very cheap.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

There is a highly entertaining battle going on in conservative circles and the Republican party over the Soul of Conservatism. In one corner you have mostly east coast conservative intellectuals and moderate Republicans like David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, George Will and Olympia Snowe arguing that the last eight years have been a nightmare for average people and that's why the voters are heavily trending Democrat. These sensible conservatives recognize that the Bush tax cuts did exactly nothing for working people, the Iraq war was and is an avoidable boondoggle, global warming is a real threat, and gay marriage is a non-issue for people under 30. They understand that their party has been on the wrong side of these issues for the last decade and that their party has lost these battles.

In the other corner we have the unhinged, blathering, tone-deaf extremists like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin and my old classmate Andrew Breitbart, seeming to think we are in some sort of Lost time loop that won't let us out of 2003. To them tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy have saved the economy, the mission in Iraq has been accomplished, environmentalists are wimps, and gay marriage is an outrage. All we need is Four More Years! This camp has apparently learned nothing from the last two elections. They imagine some sort of hidden constituency that will only show its face if the party goes more retrograde and extremist. Hey why not try to repeal civil rights legislation and women's suffrage while we are at it? Perhaps we could restore the Colonial era death penalty for homosexuality? That oughtta bring out the voters!

The fact of the matter is that the Lost Decade, or the first decade of the 21st Century, is already over. We handed it to the neocons and in return they took everything we had and ran. The next decade (the Teens I suppose) belongs to us socially liberal/fiscally responsible types, the Democrats and moderate Republicans.

(And don't pay any attention to revisionists who would paint the Republicans as fiscally responsible: they demanded hundreds of billions to dump into Iraq and handed the drug companies more billions in the form of Medicare Part D. These people don't invest in our country, they hand out our money as gifts to their friends and corporate allies.)

Personally, I would just as soon see the delusional, backward conservatives take over the Republican party and nominate Rush for the presidency in 2012. This would free the moderates in their party to become Democrats.

Monday, March 9, 2009

The video of the song we produced, "La Bruja", with the downtown glitter mafia known as Escandalo is done! It's up on that video site - what's it called again? - oh yeah, YouTube. The various mixes are available on iTunes and Juno for your iPads as well (I particularly like the Max Tannone remix, as well as the original of course). Watch, listen, buy!

Friday, March 6, 2009

It seems to be a perfect accident of history that we had the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and then the whatever-this-is-s. In the late 90s there were a bunch of clever clever folks who wanted to call this decade the Naughties. You see, "naught" is some sort of ancient British term for zero and this decade was going to be so very naughty, what with all the gay sex and subversive theatre and such. Thank God that term didn't stick.

What we got instead was a horrifying waste of time and resources, a stupid unwinnable war in Iraq in which we are only now recognizing Iran as the beneficiary, and a whole bunch of counterproductive bloviating by the Ann Coulters, Rush Limbaughs and Andrew Breitbarts of the world.

It was as if the 20th Century threw up on the 21st Century.

And here in 2009, with no one able to do so much as find a job, we are finding that the last 10 years, so full of new century optimism in the beginning, was entirely lost to Bush/Cheney and the like.

Only now do we realize it has been a Lost Decade. May we never surrender another ten years to such malevolent, incompentent assholes.